Telecommunications service subscribers have grown dependant on messaging systems. Often, subscribers have email, text, and voice messaging systems, as well as a separate fax number. Requiring a subscriber to maintain this collection of messaging services is at least inefficient and can lead to confusion on the part of the subscriber and on the part of parties attempting to contact the subscriber.
In an attempt to provide a more efficient approach, service providers and messaging system developers have created unified massaging systems. Conventional unified messaging systems provide a single data store for storing voicemail, email, short messaging service (SMS), and other messages, as well as faxes. The messaging system includes one or more converters that convert the message into some common format when the message is received so that the message can be placed in the subscriber's “inbox.” The subscriber accesses the inbox to “read” the message. While conventional unified messaging solutions do provide a single interface that combines the subscribers various messaging services, the conventional solutions suffer from several limitations.
One limitation of conventional unified messaging systems is a lack of flexibility. In conventional systems, the subscriber must either access the system through a single interface, such as a computer-based graphical user interface, or the subscriber must perform a configuration process during which the subscriber chooses a delivery mechanism by which the message is routed. For example, in the U.S. Pat. No. 6,438,217 to Emmanuel L. Huna (hereinafter “Huna”), a user specifies a delivery time in the future and a method by which the system delivers messages received by the user's email or voicemail messaging service. The user must specify the future time and the type of device to which the messages are forwarded. The approach provides very limited flexibility to the subscriber.
Other conventional unified messaging systems allow the user to access the systems via multiple types of devices, but the systems convert the format of the message based only on the type of address accessing the messaging platform. For example, if a user requests the message from a phone, the system converts the message to analog audio. If the requesting device has an Internet Protocol (EP) address, the system converts the message to text or some other digital format. See, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,233,218 to Donald F. Picard, et al.
These conventional systems suffer from additional limitations. For example, conventional systems convert an entire message, or at least the portions they are able to convert, and forward the entire message to the user. While this approach may be acceptable if the user accesses the service via a fully multimedia-capable personal computer (PC), the conventional approach is problematic when the user accesses the service using a cell phone, web-capable cell phone, personal digital assistant, and the like.